Hello and welcome to "Applause Performances," sampling the sounds of Northeast Ohio.

I'm Ideastream Public Media's Amanda Rabinowitz, and here are the Zerbo Brothers, a traditional West African trio putting roots down in the Forest City.

What a beautiful melody to get things started.

Welcome to the Zerbo Brothers.

Hello.

Thank you.

So great to have you all here.

I want to introduce everyone.

Emmanuel Zerbo is on percussion and vocals.

Welcome.

We have Joseph Zerbo, who's playing the electric guitar and also singing.

And the third Zerber brother, Darren Hamm, who is on the acoustic guitar.

Thank you all for being here.

I want talk about that first song you just played.

"Soleil du Faso," it's dedicated to your homeland in.

Burkina Faso, West Africa.

So tell us about the meaning of that song in particular.

Talk about life there and what inspired that song.

Yeah, so we grew up in Africa, West Africa Burkina Faso, where from a big family, where there's joy and laughter, children running around.

But things have changed for the last 20 years.

Things have gone bad, with political instability, terrorist attacks, and a lot of people not being able to live in their own village anymore because of insecurity.

And because of all those reasons, Burkina is now considered a red zone, basically telling people don't go there because you can get killed.

So for us, it's our homeland, and we want to bring people back to that, you know, that joy again, because we had such a beautiful childhood there, and there's something special about it.

So we don't want to focus so much on the dangerous part of it, but we think if we can write song, music, and travel, we can just write song and bring people's mind to know that.

It's not always going to be bad.

We're hoping for a new rising sun, where we talk about hope and joy.

So in "Soleil du Faso," we talk about all the good events that happen in Burkina Faso.

Tourism, inviting people to come back.

FESPACO is one of the international film events that happened in Burkina.

SIAO is also another wonderful place for artists to join and talk about their products and their art.

And we're just hoping that people will listen to this song and find that joy and then come back to Burkina Faso.

I love that.

It's like a celebration of the homeland.

And Joseph, I know for you, how does playing these songs and playing this music help connect you to back home?

Yeah, thank you for the question.

And if I play that song, I'm here, but my heart is in Burkina Faso right now.

And I think, like Emmanuel told us, soon everything will be okay, and we can do the same thing like before.

Yeah, I like that.

And Darren, you have, along with your music career, worked with immigrants.

Talk about that and how music can help people who are new to this country.

Yeah, most of my past has been working with people who have very few belongings, whose lives have been blown apart.

They've been pushed across borders.

They found themselves in a new land rebuilding their life.

And there's very few things that hold you together.

So from my family heritage and the immigrants who arrived in Cleveland and had to rebuild, working really difficult jobs, helping build the city, starting from scratch, the legacy continues today with whether you're a refugee, asylee, immigrant.

Coming carrying the things you can and holding things dear to you that you can and maintaining those as long as you can.

What's so unique is sharing those with so many other people and bringing those gifts and kind of blending them together which makes this country such a wonderful place to do it.

But I think sometimes those are the things that keep families and individuals with a sense of hope and escaping some of the trauma they faced in their lives.

Yeah, and to feel connected.

Emmamuel, I want to talk about growing up in Burkina Faso.

That's how you started playing music at a really young age.

Can you talk about that, how your journey in music began?

Yeah, so I grew up in a musical family.

My dad played harmonica and clarinet, saxophone, and I was just so interested in percussion.

So I would grab my mom's plates whenever I have a chance.

I was like, when she's not home, of course, I'll just really banged on them and then, you know, make some dance and when she comes, she complains about it.

But, you now, I said, I'm sorry.

And so, and that's how I started playing.

And I was mostly involved in church.

So, and then when my mom just said, hey, you can, rather than playing on those plates, why don't you use a calabash?

So she'll use a calabash for her morning routine, carrying water in the calabash, putting milk in the calabash and using the water to bathe children.

And at the end of the day, she will give me the calbash and I will play it as an instrument.

So that's how it was, it was the safest way for her to do that because then I don't have to destroy her stuff.

But then since then I've been playing the calabash and different percussion instruments.

Can you talk a little bit about the setup there?

Because I'm sure to a lot of people, those drums that you have are not things that we're used to seeing.

So can you talk a little about what you're playing there with the drums?

Yes, absolutely.

So when you think about Africa, there's a lot of things we don't have access to.

We don't access to a drum, we don't have access a guitar center or anything like that.

Even if we had access to, we didn't have the money to buy.

So we will use what we have around the house or around the garden and we just make music out of those things.

So the calabash is, it's a gourd, the big fruit, it is not edible.

It's a gourd and when you grow the calbash, you will just dry it and then cut it in half.

Take stuff out of it and then it becomes a plate or an instrument.

So you can use it for multiple purposes and at the end of the day, you can play.

There's a different way of playing it.

People play on the sand, flip upside down or just using your finger with some rings and tap it and you get that nice sound of it.

Or you can your fist where you get the bass.

So that makes it a lot of fun to play.

That's really cool.

Now to your right, you have another drum there that I've never seen before.

Can you talk about how that works and show us?

So this is a handpan, originally from Switzerland.

And it's starting to become very popular.

People are using that in yoga studio for meditation.

But as Africans, we relate everything to a beat and nice melodies.

So we use it for our own songs.

And we have one song called Sequoia, where we play this song, this instrument.

And I will just play like a bar of the sequoia so you can hear how this sounds.

Very nice.

Okay, and then that other instrument to your left, talk to us about that.

So this is a kora.

It's an instrument that has 21 strings, and it's totally made out of wood, calabash, and animal skin.

So the kora has about 21, mine has 21 strings, and some koras have 22 strings, and the 22nd string is in red.

They made it a red color in memory of the king that came up with the kora, Masalule.

And if you don't have those 22 string, after he passed they remove that 20-second string in his memory.

So most people, kora player, have 21 strings, but you'll still some kora that have 22 strings, and the 22nd will be in red color.

So it's really fun to play, and you play to worship kings and bring them in after war, and a player doesn't have enough time to grab money sometimes when people give them money, so you have this little hole where people put tip in it, and technically it's supposed to let the sound out, but we can use it for different purposes.

The joke about the kora, they said if you're not a good kora player, you better be a good fisherman because you have all these fishing lines that you can use for different purposes.

That's funny.

I love it.

So we play one song that we call, "I Can See the River," and I'll play that one with the cora.

Great.

And Joseph, when we talk about you playing guitar, how did that start for you?

Oh, I started the guitar when I was really, really young.

The story is that my brother, like cousin, came from study in Morocco, and he brought guitar.

And sometime he put the guitar, and if he left to something, we hidin' and tried to play the guitar like that.

Little bit, little bit, that was five string.

Usually the guitar six string.

There was five strings, but we tried to play, to play to play.

And if it comes in, who touch my guitar?

Nobody touch your guitar.

There's a lot of sleeping around in the house.

Plates and... Like that, start little bit, little bit.

And after that, try to play a little bit in the church.

At that time, the church don't have guitar too.

Sometimes the people bring the guitar and we try to play and it's like that, I start to... To play guitar a little bit, and today, well, I continue to play a little bit little bit.

A lot.

So it started young as well for you.

Darren this group's been together about a year and a half now.

What's the response?

I know you have been playing out quite a bit.

What's that response that you get from Northeast Ohio folks when they hear this group playing?

Yeah, you know, we've had a really positive response.

I think it's, we have a unique blend of music and a unique blend, I think, of musical sensibility.

And so we're really trying to create things that blend traditions together in a new way.

It's very natural for us.

We sit down, he could hum a melody, we have song all of a sudden, and it flows very easily for us, which is really unique as musicians.

And when you bring that out, you never know how it's gonna be received.

There's not a lot of West African music in Northeast Ohio.

So I will say that puts us in a really great spot to share the traditions and.

The language and the instruments and the things we care so much about.

So I found that we've gotten a really great response.

We've very consistently asked for performances and such, and it's been a blast.

Well, let's hear the next song.

Who wants to talk about the next song we're going to hear?

"Sahara Lolo" is about the same, almost the same meaning as "Soleil du Faso", so we're still in that aspect of bringing people back to Africa.

So Sahara, when you think about the Sahara desert, you think of sand.

It's really hot in the morning and it's very cold in the evening, just don't go there.

But we talked about the moon of Sahara at night time, what do you see?

You know, it's joyful, people get together and sit down and tell stories, so we talk about all the beautiful things that happen under the moon in Sahara.

Wonderful.

Let's hear it.

I love that one.

You just seem so joyful when you all are playing.

And I know that that's the point.

The music makes us forget about everything.

So we enjoy the moment.

In life, the present, it's all that matters.

Just sitting here right now, knowing what's going on around us.

It's what that matters because here in the United States, it's really easy to get caught into thinking like what do I have to do tomorrow?

What do I do next week?

What do I do in two weeks?

Versus thinking about the present.

This is all we have right now and we don't know what tomorrow's gonna bring and we just enjoy it.

That's part of the smile and.

It's a good problem to have, I guess.

I want to hear a little bit more about your journey to America.

I know, Emmanuel, you actually won a lottery for a visa in 2008.

Yes.

And you landed with a host family in Berea.

That's correct.

Talk a little about arriving here and what this was like for you coming to Northeast Ohio.

Absolutely.

Yeah, so in 2008, I won the green card, diversity visa, to come to America.

And I had to find a host family.

And through missionaries, I was able to find the Crestman family in Berea.

And they took him in as one of their son, because they are four little boys.

And then I was the oldest, yet the youngest of the family.

But when I arrived, I had no idea where I was going.

I knew I was go to America, but I didn't know where I going.

So arrive in New York and I'm at the airport and they have smoke coming out of my mouth because it was cold it was in January and I had this big jacket on and then they drive me all the way to Cleveland where we had 18 inches of snow on the ground I had no idea what to expect and I just called my mom I said hey this is very depressing because the trees are all gray there's no leaves on them and I see a deer in my backyard I don't know what's going on and she's like you know what it's gonna be better it's gonna be okay so I started learning Language as I was getting to know that family and I didn't speak English I knew a few words, but I didn't speak a lot of English So I will listen to the boys in the morning when they say what would you like for breakfast?

I say Cheerio, and when I come out and say I want Cheerio.

I had no idea what Cheerio was So it worked out.

Did you like the Cheerios too?

You know what?

I didn't like it.

I called them baby doughnuts Or donut seed, I think I call it donut seed.

But anyway, so that's how I started learning it.

But music was always a great way to end the night, because you would talk to a lot of people, people asking so many questions.

At the end of the day, I was so exhausted.

I'm like, these people are asking this question, I don't even know how to speak the language.

And I would just pick up a djembe that was like, they got it from a tourist purposes, like a small djembe.

And I'd just play that, and that would really help me unwind and just.

Get ready for the next day.

Sometimes it's very hard to think about the next day because Sunday we're gonna go to church, questions are coming again, but it was doable.

Such a great story.

Joseph, I know you arrived many years later and you were seeking asylum from the troubles in Burkina Faso.

Yes.

You eventually moved in with Emmanuel into his basement where all the instruments are.

Talk about that time in your life and getting acclimated here too.

Oh, at that time, the good thing keep me like really free is like the family, the married family and the music.

Because that was, it's really hard, it is hard.

But with the family with the music, I try, sometimes, I hear you play music yesterday night, I hear you play, I play music all the time to keep my brain like focus, focus, focus and I'm still I'm good now, nothing bad, and I think that's the thing I can say.

And Darren, you've worked with immigrants.

How difficult is it to learn the language and get acclimated here?

It's one of the biggest barriers.

Not everybody comes with functional language, job skills, sometimes even formal education.

So when you're starting from scratch, the language is overwhelming to many people.

So it usually takes a period of years.

You know, some people learn more quickly than others.

But I think once that's conquered, I think one of things is if you can start to understand and tell jokes, you feel you learn the language.

Yeah.

I remember.

I remember one time I went to a party and somebody said, oh, this is a piece of cake.

And I was waiting for a piece a cake.

I waited, waited.

And at the end of the game, I said, somebody was talking about a piece of cake, they're like, no, it's an idiom.

I was like, what is that?

Then I go to the library, I pick this huge book, and then the next day, I'm like, hey, stop twiddling your thumb.

It's raining cats and dogs.

And I'm, like, oh, it is pretty fun to use them.

But those are the things that can really change your perspective.

Because if they throw one word that you don't know the meaning, it really shift everything around.

So I don't like to read in English, because the idioms are always a limitation for me.

But now it's starting to get a little bit better.

Yeah, it changes your sense of like sense of belonging, right?

I mean you can exist maybe in a workplace Maybe you could extend that a little bit to some people around you like neighbors or community members But until you really have a command of it I think it feels like you're really isolated inside or turned inward.

Yeah And, you know, I guess for all of you, it seems like music is a common language for you all.

Is that a great way to communicate as well?

It is.

Probably one of the best.

It's really interesting.

You know, they come from a culture that music's embedded.

So you hear them talk about how they've relied on it in difficult times, how they carried it with them.

In the U.S., less than 1% of people perform, like as a performing artist.

So we treat it as kind of an elective, something we do on the side, something that we have to study and learn.

It's not built in the fabric, but you can see how it's treated like medicine in the rest of the world.

Like it, it really helps people heal.

Feel a sense of home, feel a sense of pride.

So it's really easy when we connect because sometimes we do have some language barriers but we click really well with music.

Yeah, music makes you want to come together.

Together.

Let's hear another song.

What's the next one we're going to hear?

The next one is "Landa Ko."

So "Landa Ko" talks about a different tradition in Burkina Faso, in Africa, where certain ethnics are not allowed to marry a girl from a different group of ethnic groups.

So we talk about like, well, love is love.

When people love each other, just let them get married to one another rather than, okay, grandpa said you can't do that, grandma said you cannot do that.

It becomes very complicated.

So we hope this music brings people together.

What language are you singing in?

So I'm singing in Jula, which is similar to Bambara, spoken in Mali, West Africa.

But Jula is similar, to Bambara, but there's some divergences.

It's a little bit different from Bambara, but that's how the language we singing into Jula.

A lot of Jula and some French every once a while, but mostly in Jula.

That's very beautiful.

I want to talk about how the three of you came together because we would talk about Darren's the third brother.

Yeah, he's a brother.

I've always wanted brothers, so this is great for me.

Emmanuel, tell the story of how you met Darren.

You wanna take this one?

Yeah, sure.

Yeah, we had a mutual friend who I think within about two weeks or so called us all, right, and said I'm, he was getting married, you guys are going to play at my wedding.

I said, that's not normally how it works.

Usually you rehearse with a band, you play and such.

But he said, just bring your guitar and an amp.

There'll be some guys there, they'll bring their instruments.

And we talked maybe one time before, it was about two days before the wedding, just really quick on the phone.

And I said okay, I'll try and do these things.

You guys try and those things.

We showed up, we plugged in, and we clicked instantly.

It's very rare with musicians that that happens and we were so happy We were setting rehearsal schedule by the time we left the wedding and we instantly bonded I felt so happy to be around them.

They're two of the finest people I think I've ever met so to have that plus have a musical hearts that that connect is really amazing.

Yeah, so now we cannot play without Brother Darren He looks funny when you line them up.

Sometimes I like to keep it in the middle because it's like Oreo cookie.

That's great.

It tastes much better that way.

He's a brother Zerbo Darren.

We love him.

It brings us so much joy.

Yeah, it's so great.

Joseph, what was that like for you meeting Darren and suddenly just playing all together?

Was it kind of scary at first?

Oh, that was, that like a, like natural.

It was.

Because at that day, I still remember, we tried to do something like blues jazz.

We didn't do rehearsal together.

But when I do something, he do the same thing.

I say, oh, this guy is my brother.

Call and answer, call and answer.

After that, he say, man, that great.

Yeah.

And that was really, that natural and really good.

Yeah.

It doesn't happen very often as musicians.

I think Brother Darren really made us really enjoy our music much more, because we didn't know that we could play our music out.

We were just in the bedroom, in the courtyard, but when we met Brother Darren, and Brother Darren started connecting with other people that said, hey, you guys want to join us, you want to play, so it's been a really great opportunity to show what we have, to talk about the stories, and just to be able to forget about some hardship and just focus on music and have a good time.

Well, let's hear one more song before we say goodbye.

All right.

Do you want to tell us a little bit about this one we're gonna we're going to hear last?

"Will of God"?

Yeah, so the last one is the Will of God and that we wrote this song about my uncle Simon.

Simon was blind, he couldn't see, but it was so gifted to be able to touch things and know either the color of them or touching the bill and say this is a $20 bill.

It was so gifted and we just wrote this song saying it's a will of God.

So being blind is not something bad.

It's not the eye that see but it's the mind that see.

So that's about the song.

Beautiful.

Yeah, thank you.

Wonderful.

This has been such a treat.

Thank you all for sharing your songs and your story today.

It's Emmanuel and Joseph Zerbo, Darren Hamm, the Zerbo brothers.

Thanks so much for joining us.

Thanks for having us.

Thank you.

Thank you for having me.

Merci beaucoup.

For more stories about local music, be sure to follow our "Shuffle" podcast, featuring the independent music scene here in Northeast Ohio.